Ryan Tedder on OneRepublic’s New Album and Embracing the Unexpected

As a songwriter for the biggest names in pop and the frontman of the rock group OneRepublic, Ryan Tedder estimates having sold “hundreds of millions of records,” but his commercial strategy can be counterintuitive. The band’s new album, Oh My My, hits shelves on Friday, and Tedder calls the lead single “Wherever I Go” “a really odd song to lead with”—more skittish and angular than usual. “It doesn’t really sound like us,” he tells Vogue.com. “We just wanted to see what we could get away with.”

It’s a high-risk move with potentially high rewards: “If you’re able to connect with something really different that people don’t expect,” Tedder says, “that’s the best kind of song to have.” OneRepublic has tried this approach before, climbing the pop charts with hits ranging from the soaring power ballad “Apologize” to the stern folk onslaught of “Counting Stars." And Tedder has also shown an aptitude for the unexpected in the songs he has written for others, moving between scorched earth rock (The Fray’s “Love Don’t Die”), classic soul (Adele’s “Rumour Has It”), and plinky ’80s-inflected pop (Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York”).

One listener who fell for a Tedder curveball was the English singer Leona Lewis. “One of the first songs I heard by Ryan was ‘Apologize,’” she recalls via email. “It was so fresh and stood out from everything that was being played at that time.” She subsequently recorded “Bleeding Love,” a Tedder cowrite that approaches the status of a modern standard. “Whether [his] song is a stripped-back ballad or a full-on production piece, the foundation is always strong,” she says. “He understands what it is to be the artist as well as the producer, so he has a great vantage point from which he can craft.”

Tedder likes to stay busy, so he commenced work on Oh My My in 2014 around the time he finished contributing to Adele’s 25 and U2’s Songs of Innocence. “I was like, for the first time ever, I don’t have something on deck,” he remembers. “We need to do another album. We need to get going now.”

Due to the band’s heavy touring schedule, much of the album was recorded in hotel rooms around the world, where the group attempted to cook up songs that would counter the dominance of digital pop. “When you’re in a band, I think it’s even more important that people can tell there are human beings doing the music,” Tedder explains. “It would be one thing for us to do a song with The Chainsmokers or Kygo. It would be another thing to rip off The Chainsmokers and try to sound like them.”

Oh My My ignores many of the current schools of Top 40 production—there’s no dancehall cut, no pop trap, no “tropical house”—but not in the way you might expect from a rock band: A portion of the album plays instead like a love letter to disco. “Oh My My,” “Dream,” and “A.I.” place their faith in chunky, strutting bass lines. “The idea for that came from not wanting to do another EDM-sounding dance record,” Tedder says. “How does our band do an uptempo record in 2016 that doesn’t have a DJ on it? We were listening to the Italian and French disco stuff from the ’90s, and we were like, Oh, that’s how you do it. We dialed in that sound.”

To help with the title track, Tedder called on the duo Cassius, one of several French groups that influenced Oh My My. Tedder has cited M83 (“Midnight City”) as an inspiration for the latest single “Kids,” and his rhetoric about the importance of the human element in pop echoes the arguments that another French duo, Daft Punk, made around the release of Random Access Memories in 2013.

This direction initially surprised even some of the people involved in the recording, like Noel Zancanella, a writer signed to Tedder’s Patriot Games Publishing company who has credits on roughly half of Oh My My’s 16 tracks. “The first funky record we wrote for the album was ‘Oh My My,’” he remembers. “Ryan had just bought a vocoder, one of the old-school ones, Daft Punk style. We started playing with it right away.” Everyone liked the results of the experiment. “I was like, ‘This is an amazing song—who are we gonna pitch it to? ’” Zancanella recalls. “They were like, ‘No, dude, this is for us.’ I think it’s a really cool move.”

“As a band, if you’re going to evolve and grow, you have to win over new people,” Tedder explains. “You’re trying to reach as many as possible—you can’t do that by doing the same thing over and over.” Zancanella expresses a similar sentiment, pointing out that “safe is as risky as risky. You can try to play it safe, but that shit can flop, too.”

Tedder is encouraged by the reception to “Wherever I Go.” “It took a minute, but it connected,” he says. “We’ll probably sell 3 million copies of that song, which is shocking—that to me is not even close to one of the better songs on the album. Logic would dictate it would make sense to pick the one that feels like the most reactive and lead with that. For whatever reason, we’ve never done the logical thing.”